


Where the water is blue and the people are new

by livenudebigfoot



Category: Lost
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Banter, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, M/M, but the canon high school au that exists within Lost
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-08
Updated: 2020-08-08
Packaged: 2021-03-05 22:08:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 20,262
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25502605
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/livenudebigfoot/pseuds/livenudebigfoot
Summary: His first name is John, he remembers suddenly. John Locke, like the philosopher. Dr. Linus opts not to mention it. He must get that all the time.
Relationships: Benjamin Linus/John Locke
Comments: 14
Kudos: 34
Collections: Rare Male Slash Exchange 2020





	Where the water is blue and the people are new

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Selena](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Selena/gifts).



At first, he does not know him.

Dr. Linus can’t be blamed for that. Colorful though their brief association has been, he barely knows Mr. Locke. Their interactions have been fleeting, strange. And he’s only ever seen him in the wheelchair or flat on his back on hot asphalt or strapped to a gurney. This is different. Standing, walking is different.

He stands in the doorway to the teacher’s lounge now, observing the room as if for the first time. Enjoying the perspective that height brings, maybe. When he sees Dr. Linus, his eyes scrunch up, creased and warm as he smiles.

Dr. Linus is standing up too, suddenly. He’s not sure why.

“Dr. Linus,” Mr. Locke says. “Nice to see you again. How are you?”

“When…?” Dr. Linus begins, but this seems insufficient. He lets out a very small, nervous laugh. He’s not sure how to address it, if it should be addressed. “How…?” he tries again.

Mr. Locke raises his hands in a small gesture of good-natured surrender, an acknowledgement of the absurdity. “I met a spinal surgeon. While I was in the hospital. Actually, before that, but…”

When did he last see Mr. Locke? It’s difficult to say with a substitute; they’re fleeting and inconsistent. Here one day, gone the next. But of course, he recalls: the day he was punched, the day he fought that man in the parking lot. That was only weeks ago. “How…?” Dr. Linus tries again.

Locke smiles, small and faintly reticent. “He’s a very good spinal surgeon.”

“That is…an astonishing recovery.”

Mr. Locke looks down at his own legs and considers. His feet seem to flex in his brown loafers, rocking from toe to heel just for the sake of it. When he lifts his head, his grin is almost impossibly sunny. “Guess so.”

It’s bizarre, the urge to shake his hand, but Dr. Linus isn’t certain of what else to do and he feels as though he’s meeting this man for the first time. Mr. Locke doesn’t seem to mind. His hand - rough from hard work, scarred and calloused in peculiar places - closes around Dr. Linus’s and shakes firm and friendly.

His first name is John, he remembers suddenly. John Locke, like the philosopher. Dr. Linus opts not to mention it. He must get that all the time.

“You’re working again?” Dr. Linus asks him.

“I am. Mr. Halliwax, the biology teacher is, I guess, taking a leave of absence. I’m covering his classes until the end of the school year. Dr. Arzt was supposed to bring me up to speed. Is he around?”

Dr. Linus realizes that he’s been shaking Locke’s hand for perhaps ten seconds too long and that this man is here to do more than talk to him. He releases him, brushes his palm against his khakis to rid it of the warmth. “Of course. He’s probably in his classroom. I could show you the way if…”

“Please, if you could. It’s been a little while. I don’t quite know my way around yet.”

Locke’s stride is loose and easy. He seems to relish every step.

* * *

_He’s in a small, dark room and he’s alone. He’s cold and he’s in pain and he’s alone. He’s alone, but he hears voices echoing through the air vent: conversations, arguments, records played soft and low. Someone has hurt him, hurt him badly, but he’s not frightened. He’s just waiting. He’s waiting for someone to open the door._

_When the door opens, when light floods in, Mr. Locke’s the one standing in the doorway. Locke regards him with suspicion, with fascination._

_Ben leaps to his feet_

_(except he can’t do that, except he’s tied hand and foot, isn’t he?)_

_and says: “That is...an astonishing recovery.”_

_It’s not what he’s supposed to say._

* * *

He learns of Mr. Locke’s classes in murmurs and scraps. Excitable chatter at the front of his classroom about poisonous plants growing in the biology lab. Dark teasing at the back of his classroom about fetal pig dissections. The scent of his classroom: the musk of soil, the perfume of flowers, the peculiar chemical twist of formaldehyde. A cursory glance through the tiny window in his classroom door revealing a jungle of plants, a live white rabbit in a cage. Harsh whispers in the teacher’s lounge about budgetary restrictions.

Arzt does more than whisper. “I don’t know where he’s getting the money for all this stuff,” he says to Dr. Linus across the lunch table.

“Could be paying for it out of pocket,” Dr. Linus points out. “We’ve all done that from time to time.”

“You have, maybe. But it’s not just that. He’s also messing with the lesson plan. Guy’s a substitute; he’s supposed to teach the textbook and not get any crazy ideas,” Arzt mutters darkly. He considers for a moment before admitting, “Kids seem into it, though.”

Dr. Linus asks Alex about it over dinner one day and her eyes spark with jealousy. “Why couldn’t the guy who teaches biology by taking kids outside and actually _teaching them biology_ show up when I was a freshman?”

“Regretting taking AP Chem this year, Alex?”

“You know I’m not.” She lets out a tiny sigh, taps her spoon against the rim of her bowl. “But I heard his sophomore bio class got to dissect a cow brain last week.”

Across the table, Danielle makes a noise of disgust and pushes away her dinner.

“It just feels like a missed opportunity,” Alex says, by way of soothing her mother’s appetite. “Anyway...I don’t know. He’s a substitute; he doesn’t have to care that much. It’s cool that he does.”

Dr. Linus supposes that’s true. He supposes they’re philosophically aligned, in that sense. The sense of being overly involved.

Despite the small disturbances Mr. Locke creates, he himself is a man of quiet habits. He’s unfailingly friendly, but doesn’t go out of his way to socialize. He spends his breaks walking lazy laps around the perimeter of the school, as peaceful and satisfied as though he were walking on a beach somewhere, and not through parking lots and football fields. He walks with his face upturned, his eyes half-closed, as satisfied as a cat in the sun.

He passes by Dr. Linus’s classroom window during fourth period most days. He’s never sure whether to interrupt class to acknowledge him, whether to let him pass on his way.

He’d like to say something.

* * *

_He wakes up very late at night or very early in the morning and Locke is in his room._

_He feels Locke’s presence first. He adds a curious weight to the air, somehow. Like everything has become so much more important._

_Visually, he seems to almost bleed into the room. There’s a shadow in the corner. The shadow has a deepest part, a darkness where all lines melt and bend. That’s where he comes in through. He takes on mass and shape and angles until he was always there, always sitting in the corner of Ben’s room._

_Ben can’t move. Also, doesn’t want to move. He lies there, cheek on the pillow, watching Locke with the utmost fascination. “How do you even know where I live?” he asks._

_He lifts one finger to his lips. “Shh,” he says. “Keep your voice down.”_

_Ben’s excited. He’s horribly excited._

* * *

A knock on Dr. Linus’s desk jolts him out of a daze.

Mr. Locke is leaning over him with an amused kind of concern. “Sorry about that. Didn’t mean to startle you.”

“No, not at all, I...” Dr. Linus shuffles papers around his desk in a reasonable simulation of work. “I guess I haven’t been sleeping very well lately.”

Peculiar dreams. Mr. Locke doesn’t need to know about that.

Locke’s concern deepens to a very small frown. “I’m sorry to hear that, Dr. Linus.”

“Don’t be. It’s really not serious.” He shoves a stack of recently-graded tests aside and folds his hands primly in the center of his desk. “What can I do for you, Mr. Locke?”

“I was wondering if you’d like to take a little trip with me.” He gestures like _May I?_ and when Dr. Linus nods, bewildered, Locke half-sits on the edge of his desk as though he belongs there. “I got permission to bring some of my biology students out to Ventura. For the botanical gardens. Officially.” He winks, which Dr. Linus finds faintly transgressive. “Really, for the beach. We’ve been talking a lot about field taxonomy, looking at the ecosystems in your own backyard.” He flashes a grin of almost startling brightness. “You can find a whole universe in a tide pool.”

Dr. Linus isn’t certain what to do with this information. He’s never seen a universe in a tide pool, but he also hasn’t recently looked.

“Anyway, I’m just a substitute and it’s more kids than I should probably be handling on my own. Kinda seems like I need a second chaperone. The San Buenaventura Mission’s right down the street and they tell me you run the history club.” He rolls his broad shoulders. “Something you’d be interested in?”

He surprises himself when his first reaction is anger. Even after all these years, even with Reynolds living under his thumb, even with only a few dedicated students to provide for, he’s never been given the funds or the free rein to take his students on a field trip. That this stranger, this _substitute_ , can show up and take what he was never even offered, it’s…

Well, it fills him with a bitterness, sudden and bizarre.

“I’d have to discuss it with the history club,” he says, lips pursed. “Our focus is really more on European history than on early American history. I try to let the interests and passions of the students drive our content and discussions, Mr. Locke, before anything else.”

“That’s an admirable philosophy,” Mr. Locke says, spirits undampened. “Well, let me know if they go for it. I’d be happy to have you along.”

“You’ll be the first to know,” Dr. Linus says, glancing meaningfully at where Locke’s hip meets his desk.

Locke stands. Whether he noticed Dr. Linus’s critical stare is unclear, but he does linger for a while, hands pushed in his pockets.

“Something else I can help you with?”

He hesitates a long minute, shoulders tight, jaw clenched. At last, he says, “Dr. Linus, I owe you an apology.”

He blinks. “For what?”

“Not long ago, you confronted the man who hit me with a car and he hurt you very badly. I saw you once after that, and then I went away for a long while. And not once since I came back have I asked you how you’re doing.”

“Oh.” Dr. Linus’s fingertips wander unconsciously to the bridge of his nose, where the worst of the cuts used to be. “I’d almost forgotten about that.”

“I haven’t.”

It’s not quite true, about forgetting. But it isn’t something he lingers on, not consciously. Yes, he scans the parking lot each morning for a glimpse of that familiar face, but Dr. Linus’s head has always been heavy with worries and contingencies and as the attack fades in his memory, it becomes as small and niggling a thing as remembering when his car last had an oil change. Yes, he will sometimes stare at the square set of Locke’s shoulders, the confidence of his stride, and wonder how getting hit by a car made him less paraplegic. Yes, the peace in Locke’s broad smile sometimes leaves him fascinated and vexed - _what does he know that I don’t?_ \- but the incident itself increasingly feels as though it happened a long time ago, to somebody else.

Dr. Linus doesn’t say all that. He instead says, “I’d never been in a fight before.”

“Really? Never?” Locke’s surprise seems genuine.

“I suppose it wasn’t much of a fight,” Dr. Linus reflects. “More a…a beating. But still. Never in my adult life.”

“Before your adult life?” Locke prompts.

Dr. Linus winces. “I didn’t have an...ideal time in high school.” He considers for a moment and amends: “As a student, I mean.”

Mr. Locke shrugs. “Who did?”

He looks Locke over, takes in the calm demeanor, the even features, the muscles that shift in his forearms where his sleeves are pushed back. “I have trouble imagining that you had a difficult time.”

Locke tilts his head back a little, like he’s thinking over how much to tell Dr. Linus, how much to hold onto. “I was a kid with an aptitude for science and board games,” he says after a little while. “Might not have been too bad, but I kept trying to have an aptitude for football and girls. Should’ve played to my strengths.” His eyes crinkle a little around the edges. “You’ve really never been in a fight?”

“Is that so difficult to imagine?”

“No, I guess not. You seem like a very kind man.”

He suddenly feels as though he’s being mocked, although he can’t imagine why.

“Anyway, I don’t wanna take up any more of your time, but I wanted to…thank you, Dr. Linus. Or apologize. I’m not sure; none of it seems quite right. Just, thank you for sticking up for me and I’m sorry I brought you so much trouble.”

“Oh no,” Dr. Linus says, so soft as to be practically inaudible. “You were no trouble at all.”

“Well, it’s very nice of you to say that, even though I don’t think it’s true.”

Dr. Linus isn’t quite sure how to counter that. He wants to say he’s been through worse for less, but he can’t quite recall a moment where that was true. He doesn’t regret stepping in front of that car and slamming his hands on the windshield. He doesn’t regret being punched. He ought to say so.

He doesn’t. The words get trapped in his throat somehow.

“Well, I’ll, um.” Locke makes a conciliatory gesture towards Dr. Linus’s paperwork as he makes for the classroom door. “Sorry for the interruption.”

Dr. Linus can’t quite bring himself to call out “Mr. Locke?” until his back is turned, ready to leave. He says it a little too loud.

Locke pauses in the doorway, turns halfway around to face him.

“The history club meets this afternoon. I’ll bring your very generous offer up to them. I should have an answer for you by tomorrow morning. Or this afternoon, if you’ll still be around.”

“Good. You know where to find me.”

“No,” he says with a nervous half-laugh. “I don’t.”

“My classroom,” he answers, matter-of-fact. “I gotta stay late and water all those damn plants.”

A week and a half later, their knees brush together as the bus jerks to a stop in front of the San Buenaventura Mission and Dr. Linus and his five History Club students disembark. They make up scarcely a fourth of the passengers on the bus, a fact that stings Dr. Linus only slightly.

That sting decreases as they step into the gardens of the mission, as they’re ushered into cool, dim hallways, heavy with the weight of centuries.

“Cool of Mr. Locke to invite us along,” Alex whispers under the soft, pleasant droning of their tour guide.

Dr. Linus leans in, murmurs quiet and flat, “I thought so too.”

After the tour makes its rounds and deposits them, blinking, into the bright sunlight of the garden, Dr. Linus gathers his little group to sit cross-legged in the shade of a tree, in the perfume of flowers and exhaust from the nearby road, and they talk.

About the history, of course. About the circumstances in Spain that led to Franciscan priests boarding creaking ships bound for California, the impact of their steps upon the sand. The horrors they visited upon the people they intended to convert.

It’s a rich vein. Dr. Linus can admit that. It was a good idea to come.

When the bus comes to pick them up, Locke’s students aren’t on it. “They’re down at the beach,” the driver says when he asks, “and I gotta bring you all back together.”

Dr. Linus can’t argue with that.

Dr. Linus knows there’s a beach mere blocks away – a beach for tourists and surfers – but that’s not the one the bus takes them to. They keep driving until they reach a rocky beach, dotted with rusting campers, flecked with bright green moss. Mr. Locke’s biology students are scattered across the beach themselves, elbow deep in pools of water, perched on concrete barriers, scribbling frantically in notebooks.

In the absence of anything else to do, Dr. Linus lets his students loose to scamper over the rocks and peer into tide pools and stand with their ankles in the ocean.

He finds Mr. Locke doing just that, his linen shirt fluttering in the breeze, his trousers rolled up to just below his knees as the foamy surf roils around his calves. The rocky shoreline turns to sand a little ways into the water and Locke’s feet are fully buried, like he’s something growing out of the sea and the sand.

He seems to be gazing beatifically along the shoreline. It’s only when he gets close that Dr. Linus can see the precision of his gaze, the way it follows every student on the beach.

“Mr. Locke!” Dr. Linus calls as he approaches, skittering over a few loose stones in his oxfords. “May I join you?”

“Of course,” he says, and then, “Be careful.” He uproots himself, reaches out a hand to steady Dr. Linus by the shoulder when he starts to slide again.

“Perhaps I’d better take my shoes off,” Dr. Linus admits.

“Yeah, I was just gonna suggest that.” His hand remains on Dr. Linus’s shoulder, diligently holding him upright as he struggles with his laces. “How was your tour?”

“Oh, fine, fine.” Dr. Linus shoves his socks in his pockets, ties his laces together so his shoes are easier to carry. “I’ve seen my share of Spanish missions. But I’d be…remiss if I didn’t thank you. It’s not often that I get the opportunity to take the history club on a field trip.”

Locke, apparently satisfied that Dr. Linus can remain upright on his own, bends to pluck a piece of driftwood from the sand. He begins walking up the beach, almost aimlessly, water fluttering against his legs and Dr. Linus follows. “Where have you taken them in the past?” he asks.

Dr. Linus chuckles a little. “Excuse me, I misspoke. I meant never. I’ve never had the opportunity to take the history club on a field trip.” He shrugs under Locke’s curious squint. “It’s a small club. And Principal Reynolds is of the opinion that it’s a frivolous one.”

Locke shakes his head. With the driftwood, he gestures towards Alex and another classmate, peering eagerly into a tidepool. “Not to them, it’s not.”

“I know,” he says. “Thank you,” he also says, because no one’s ever said that to him out loud.

“It’s true,” Locke insists. He pulls a knife from his pocket, flicks out the bright, thin blade and begins to dig casually into the driftwood, shaping it with the press of his thumb. “I really admire that. How you’ve devoted so much of your time to nurturing these students who need you.”

Dr. Linus feels his skin prickling, a flush creeping across his face. To his relief, Locke’s eyes remain on his work. Dr. Linus risks a compliment: “I’ve been impressed with you as well. You’ve captured the students’ imaginations and passions in such a short amount of time. Your hands-on approach is…”

Locke’s hands are still working, brown from the sun, white from scars.

Dr. Linus falls silent, swallows. “The students seem to be inspired by it. It’s rare to see this kind of enthusiasm.”

“Well,” Locke says, squinting in the late afternoon sun, “I owe it to them, don’t I?”

“Hmm?”

“It hasn’t escaped my notice - or anybody else’s - that I’m not qualified to do the job I’ve been given. I don’t have much of an education in this area. Or…” He winces, makes shy, sidelong eyes at Dr. Linus. “Any area. I finished high school. That’s about it.” The knife gouges perhaps deeper than he means it to, sends an unusually large flake of driftwood flying into the surf. Locke kicks it aside as he walks. “These kids have been saddled with an underqualified teacher. It’s not fair to them. I gotta make this worth their while. You know?”

That peculiar fury slices through him again, although not directed at Locke. More at his colleagues, his highly qualified colleagues, who could do so much more if they cared even half as much as this man who barely has an education himself. Dr. Linus swallows it down, makes his voice careful and even. “If even half of what I’ve heard from students is true, I would say that you have made this course more than worth their while. Although, of course,” he admits, “I can’t speak from experience.”

“Well, if you ever have a free period, you’re more than welcome to join us in the lab. I’d appreciate your guidance on this.” The knife winks bright in his hand.

Dr. Linus’s face grows hot. “You just...carry that with you?”

“Mm?” He follows Dr. Linus’s gaze to the knife in his hand. “Oh. It’s a tool, like any other.” He chuckles softly. “I suppose it’d be frowned upon on school property. Or on a field trip, for that matter.”

Yes, it would. Yes, it would be frowned upon. He feels as though he should frown upon it right now. Confiscate it. Another citizen's arrest, since it went so well last time. On their next step, their shoulders brush together for the barest of seconds. Dr. Linus smiles to himself as he says, “Don’t let anyone else catch you with it.”

“Sage advice.” The knife vanishes in a tiny metallic flash. “Thank you, Dr. Linus.”

But it reappears, not long after, almost compulsively. To pry open a clam and show its insides to the students. To slice through the plastic packaging rings found half-buried in the sand. To continue to shape the piece of driftwood that Locke turns between his hands. It’s carved to look like a whale, like a squid, like a leviathan. Maybe even Locke doesn’t know.

Maybe that’s the point.

* * *

_They’re walking together on the beach at night. The sand is soft, gray in the moonlight. They’ve been walking for hours with the waves lapping at their ankles and their shoulders jostling together. There’s no landmark, no pier, no end to the horizon._

_“Where are you taking me, Ben?” Locke pants._

_“I’m not taking you anywhere,” Ben answers. “I’ve been following you.”_

_He makes a small noise, sharp and exasperated. He glances back over his shoulder._

_“Oh,” Locke says. “There it is.”_

_When Ben turns, they’re standing before a cabin, small and cobbled together from driftwood. In the upper window, a light comes on._

* * *

It happens nearly by accident, beginning with the tea.

Just an easy thing, Dr. Linus supposes. He pulls into the parking lot early each morning, and Locke’s never more than a few minutes behind. Locke’s drink of choice is earl gray tea, and Dr. Linus is trying to drink less coffee. He knows which mug in the cupboard is Locke’s: white porcelain, simple, marked with an understated JL on the bottom, written in Sharpie. There’s an electric kettle in the break room. It makes sense to brew tea for the pair of them together.

On a few occasions, he’s timed it so the tea is perfectly steeped the moment Locke walks through the door.

And it’s an easy thing, too, to make sure that there’s a free seat next to him every day at lunch, so Locke will always have a place to land. So that he appears by Dr. Linus’s elbow each afternoon with a carefully prepared lunch and a beaming smile, so that when he pushes his customary tupperware container of chopped tropical fruit into the center of the table, Dr. Linus can reliably take some. He’s eaten more papaya and mango in the past month than he has in his entire life.

After a little bit, it becomes self-reinforcing. There’s a reservation card with Locke’s name on it at his side, and no one can see it but everyone knows it’s there.

It’s only slightly harder to realign their schedules. Obviously, the last thing he’d want to do is shirk his responsibilities to his students. He would never be late to class or cut one short unless he had to. What he might do is use the men’s room on the other end of the building purely so he can lean in Locke’s classroom door as he passes by. What he might do is dawdle in the stairwell at the end of the day, just a little, so Locke can easily catch up with him as they walk down to the parking lot.

What Locke might do - what he does - is knock on the frame of Dr. Linus’s classroom door one day, just after the lunch bell rings and the students have all filtered out. “I was in the neighborhood,” he says. “Walk you to the teacher’s lounge?”

It’s not on his way, not at all. But he does it every day after that.

It’s not plausibly accidental.

* * *

_Locke’s on the floor. He’s been on the floor for quite some time._

_Ben’s beginning to enjoy this, now that the bleeding is under control. Something about being needed, he thinks. He always feels stronger when people need him._

_Locke’s on his back, pale eyes fixed on Ben, and the trust radiates off him like heat, like love. Ben could do anything to him right now. He’d let it happen. Whatever it was, he’d welcome it._

_Ben would like to drag this out if he could, but there’s just no time._

_Someone’s coming._

* * *

He tries to enter the room quietly, but the way Locke’s face lights up when he slips into the biology lab makes all the students turn around. They stand in small clusters at their lab tables, goggles and smocks on, hands gloved. Locke stands before a blown-up diagram, pointer in hand.

“Dr. Linus. What brings you to our lab today?”

As he picks his way gingerly through the rows of desks, he says, “I thought I’d take you up on your invitation to audit a class.”

“Well, you picked the right day for it. We’re dissecting squid.”

“Who’s _we_?”

This earns him a few nervous giggles from the students, which he did not ask for but nonetheless finds strangely heartening.

“You’re welcome to sit this one out if you like. We only have so many squid.” He gives the diagram a hard tap. “Where were we?”

Dr. Linus isn’t sure what to expect from Locke’s lecturing style. In conversation, he finds Locke strangely withholding. He mistook it for obtuseness at first: how Locke talks openly but never answers a question to Dr. Linus’s satisfaction and allows the dialogue to zigzag and drift. Now he’s beginning to think there may be a strategy to it. He’s known Locke for months now. He still knows almost nothing about him.

When he speaks to the students, Locke is earnest and matter-of-fact. He lays his plans out in a way that makes the grisly task ahead seem simple and achievable. He praises students for asking questions, for giving him an opportunity to clarify or go deeper.

He’s good, in other words. He’s very good.

“Always kinda bothered me,” he confides a little later as they lean together against an unused lab table. “When I was a kid. I actually understood all that stuff, but it stuck in my craw that all this information was locked away like it was, behind textbooks and jargon. I guess my thinking is that if I show these kids this diagram, all those parts and systems just become a bunch of words they have to memorize. But if we do it hands-on like this…”

Something squishy and horrible flies through the air, eliciting yelps of alarm.

“…they’re real. Excuse me.” Locke’s shoulder brushes against his as he pushes away from the lab bench. “Morgan, we’ve been over this.”

Upon his return, Locke remarks, “I’m not gonna miss that part.”

Dr. Linus’s heart dips. “You’re not leaving?”

Locke’s voice drops to a murmur, soft and guilty. So the students won’t hear. “Well, you know I’m not…right for this. I never set out to be a teacher. I took the substitute job because I was a man in a wheelchair and there were some things I couldn’t do. Or things people wouldn’t let me do.” In the set of his brow, the subtle flexing of his hands, there is the faintest echo of immense anger. He recovers. “So I’m gonna stick it out until the end of the school year. Make sure I’m not leaving the school in the lurch. And then I’m going to go.”

“What will you do?”

“Dunno. Not office work. I’m done with all that. Could do construction; I’ve been looking into that lately. I have some agricultural experience. I could do some farming. Landscaping. Work in a garden center. I was a home inspector for a while. There’s always that.”

“Is there anything you haven’t done?”

“Sure, lots of things.” He grins. “That’s what I’m saying.”

“Not to broach a potentially difficult subject,” Dr. Linus begins, feeling ever so slightly like he’s about to defuse a bomb, “but is grueling physical labor something you really want to pursue at this point in your life?”

His eyes crinkle at the corners. “I spent the last four years of my life sitting down. So, yeah. Unless you have a better idea.”

“I think you could do worse than…than get a degree. Become a teacher, a real one. Because I think you have an aptitude for it and, regardless of whether or not it’s what you set out to do, I think you enjoy it.”

“That’s really kind of you to say.”

“I’m not trying to be kind.”

“There’s something I have to do first. Before I do anything else. A date with destiny, if you like.”

Dr. Linus doesn’t like. He can’t even imagine what that might mean.

“A couple weeks before I came here, I took a flight to Sydney, Australia. I was supposed to go to a conference for work, but I never showed up. I, um, I tried to go on a walkabout. And I was in a wheelchair at the time. The irony isn’t lost on me.”

“What happened?”

“They wouldn’t let me go. Should’ve been obvious. I didn’t tell them about…you know. Ahead of time. On some level, I knew that if they found out, that’d be the end of it. But part of me thought that if I just showed up, ready to go, it would…it would happen for me.” He sighs. “Anyway. Flew straight back. Lost my job, which I fully deserved. And now I’m here. This is better. A lot better. Even before the surgery. But now that I can walk again, it’s…I can do whatever I want.”

“What will you be looking for?”

“Now that, Dr. Linus,” he says, poking him in the chest, pushing his finger into the cushion of Dr. Linus’s sweater vest, “is a very good question.”

His cuticles are a deep blue-black and almost without thinking, he takes Locke’s work-roughened hand in his own to examine them. “Your fingernails are atrocious.”

“Oh. Yeah.” His rough fingers slip shyly from Dr. Linus’s grip. “Took one of the dissection kits for a test drive last night. Ink sac burst on me.”

“Ink sac?”

“Yeah. You know, it’s not all that different from ink like you’d find in a pen or in a printer cartridge,” he says. “You can take the ink sac out and write with it, if you do it right.”

“Not well, I’d imagine.”

“No,” Mr. Locke says, examining the blue-black stains on his fingernails, “no, not well.”

Dr. Linus doesn’t quite believe him about the squid ink, but in the week that follows, they start appearing. Blotchy professions of love posted on lockers. Obscenities in smeared ink passed around in the back of the classroom. A painting done by an artistically inclined student, hung with pride in the upper left corner of Locke’s whiteboard.

That’s what he stares at, just over Locke’s shoulder, when he slips into Locke’s classroom at the end of the day while he waters all his plants and feeds his animals and cleans up mysterious and horrible stains. He’s staring into those inky, incomprehensible whorls when he says, “Let me make you dinner?”

It’s a risk he wouldn’t take, ordinarily. Locke will see it for the desperate grasp it is, he’s certain. It’s only that he’s become so aware of the ticking clock, the brief window of time he’s been given to transform their feeble work-related association into something that can survive outside of that framework. Something that could survive, even if Locke went away for a while.

Locke tilts his head, flips through a mental calendar. “Sure,” he says, after a few seconds. “Tomorrow?”

Dr. Linus stalls out a little. He’d expected to have to work at this. He came up with excuses, reasonable arguments. He has them all, a little arsenal kept in readiness. Unnecessary, as it turns out.

“I…yes,” he finally says, after the silence stretches a second or two too long. “Tomorrow would be good.”

Locke follows his gaze to the painting, held to the whiteboard at two corners by magnets. “Admiring the artwork?”

“What is it?”

“Not sure,” Locke admits. “I think it’s plants. Leaves. A jungle, maybe. I’ll come by at 8, that OK?”

“Yes,” Dr. Linus murmurs, gazing into the terrible shade of those inky leaves and trees. “8 is fine.”

* * *

This was an act of hubris, he decides, elbow deep in vegetables.

It’s not that he can’t cook. He can. He remembers being good at it. As a starving academic, he was creative about these things. Adventurous, even. As a public school teacher with a barely-adequate salary and an ailing father to consider, time wins out over good food, most nights. A lot of frozen meals. A lot of takeout. He has the desire to make a nice meal, the knowledge to conceive of one. But the muscles involved are deeply out of shape. 

He should have taken Locke out somewhere. He doesn’t have a lot of money set aside for things like this, but it would have been a weight off his mind. Or perhaps a new weight, the weight of calculation. What type of cuisine versus how much to spend versus impersonal dinner and drinks with a colleague versus something far too personal. 

As the instigator here, he’s finding that he can’t make any gesture at all without giving something up. Without revealing something ugly and strange and rejectable in himself. Without over-examining why it is that Locke’s plans to depart at the end of the year fill him with such an ache. 

In an ideal world, he thinks as he remembers Locke’s meticulously packed lunches, he’d have asked Locke to make dinner for him. But Dr. Linus realizes this would be an even greater act of hubris.

He scatters olive oil and salt over a tray of vegetables and slams them roughly into the oven. One less thing, at least.

The three courteous knocks on the front door strike like a threat.

“Ben?” his father calls from the next room, voice ragged. “Your guest’s at the door.”

And then there’s this other problem. The real problem, maybe, greater than roasting vegetables or selecting an appropriate restaurant. The presence of his father has become an environmental factor to Dr. Linus, as constant as the rising and setting of the sun, as the tides going in and out. It was only when he imagined Locke stepping up to the door that the strangeness of it occurred to him: the three of them at the table together, talking over the hiss of his father’s oxygen tank.

“Yeah, Dad, I... _no_ ,” he says as he steps into the living room to find his father struggling to rise from the couch. “Sit down. I’ve got it.”

His father settles back down with a soft wheeze. “If you like. Just trying to make your life easier.”

Dr. Linus’s mouth buckles, trembles, settles in a thin, sharp line. “I know, Dad.” He takes a short, tense breath, fixes his face into a small, appropriate smile, and throws the door open. 

Locke, despite the heat, is wearing flannel. There is something pleasing to the fact that, despite the casualness of the occasion, he still chose to wear a shirt that has buttons. He holds a large ceramic bowl against one hip, filled with a vibrant sunset of chopped fruit and sealed with Saran wrap. In his other hand, he holds a six pack of beer. 

“You come bearing riches,” Dr. Linus remarks, peering into the fruit salad to stop himself from staring at the tiny white triangle of undershirt, visible where his shirt falls open too far.

The beer cans clank together as Locke shifts. “Didn’t think I’d show up empty handed, did you?”

He hadn’t really known what to expect. Nothing was a possibility. So was a live fish. This falls somewhere in the middle. “You didn’t have to do this,” Dr. Linus says, taking the beers from his hand. “Thank you, Mr. Locke.”

“John’s fine,” he says, mildly.

 _John’s fine._ His brain is on fire. He angles the six-pack so it’s behind his thigh, out of his father’s line of sight. “These will just be for us,” Dr. Linus murmurs, deep under his breath.

Locke glances past Dr. Linus into the house and, with the slightest lift of his eyebrows, seems to understand completely. “I’ll follow your lead.”

Dr. Linus steps back, lets him in.

“Dad,” he begins, expertly keeping the beers behind him as he turns, “this is…”

His father’s already on his feet, carrying the oxygen tank with him. “So, you’re Locke,” he says, hand outstretched. 

“Yes, sir, I am.” Locke shakes his father’s hand firmly and Dr. Linus is suddenly overwhelmed with the suspicion that Locke’s about to swear up and down to his father that he’ll bring Dr. Linus home safe by ten. Locke shoots Dr. Linus a sly, sidelong glance. “John’s fine, though.”

“Roger Linus. Pleasure to meet you. Ben's told me a bit about you.” Ben’s father considers for a moment. “John Locke?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Your folks were funny people, I guess.”

“No,” he says. “I don’t think they gave it that much thought.”

“Well, that’s a happy accident, isn’t it?” his father says as Dr. Linus slips away into the kitchen.

“Guess so,” he hears Locke say. 

Dr. Linus sinks to his knees, pulls the bag of marinated shrimp out of the refrigerator so he can push the six pack of beer all the way to the back of the lowest shelf, where his father will never bend to find it. He sighs with quiet relief.

“All clear?” Locke asks, sotto voice, peering around the doorframe.

“Yes. Thank you for providing cover.” Dr. Linus sets the shrimp on the counter, pulls a box of wooden skewers from his nearly-empty grocery bag.

“No problem,” he whispers, and then, “I hope I didn’t make things…”

“You didn’t,” Dr. Linus assures him, sliding a thumb under the cardboard flap and pulling the box open. He shakes a few skewers into his hand. “And how could you have known? I never told you.” 

As he spears shrimp on a skewer, one by one by one, he hears Locke’s shoes creak on the linoleum as he comes to stand elbow-to-elbow with Dr. Linus at the counter. He sets down the bowl of fruit and waits there for a while.

When Dr. Linus finally looks up, Locke’s watching him. Expectant, maybe, but also...gentle. As though he’s treading with great care. 

“He quit decades ago,” Dr. Linus says, firmly. “It’s fine.”

This seems to satisfy his guilt. Locke nods at the shrimp. “Looks good.”

It objectively doesn’t.

“It’s running a little behind, I’m afraid. I’ll have it ready in just a moment if you’ll...”

Locke nudges him, a soft elbow in his side. Very softly, he says, “Put me to work.”

“Oh, no,” Dr. Linus protests. “I’m the one falling behind. Just sit down. Relax.”

“I can’t, uh, do that.” It’s then that Dr. Linus notices that his care is also nervousness, a bright energy, a restlessness of the hands. “Where can I help here?”

Dr. Linus hesitates for a moment. “I don’t suppose you can grill?”

Locke’s eyes light up.

He can grill, as it turns out. It would have been peculiar if he couldn’t: a violation of the specific sort of person Locke seems to be, or the image he seems to cultivate. He helps Dr. Linus to put all the shrimp on skewers and takes the tray to the backyard to sort things out, and suddenly Dr. Linus is in control again. Because Locke is here, and he didn’t recoil from Dr. Linus’s father, and he doesn’t seem to want to do anything but help, and it’s only dinner, and there’s really just the salad left to take care of anyway. 

Dr. Linus does that: slices cherry tomatoes and crumbles goat cheese for the salad, takes bread rolls from the oven and piles them high in a basket. He checks on the roasted vegetables, sets a small reminder. He sets the table while he’s at it. 

When he goes to check on Locke in the backyard, he finds that Locke has tossed the flannel shirt on the picnic table and is grilling in his crisp white undershirt.

The shrimp is slightly overdone. Dr. Linus cannot bring himself to care.

Inside again, he can’t stop himself from stealing glances at Locke, shy little sips of the way his hands move when he talks, of the glitter in his eyes. His manner isn’t all that different from how it is at work - his soft-spoken, amiable chatter; the earnest interest he takes in what other people have to say; the way he smiles to himself sometimes, as though he’s sitting on a private joke - but there’s something else too. 

He suspects that Locke may be trying to ingratiate himself. 

He calls Dr. Linus’s father “sir” at every opportunity. He draws out Roger Linus’s dormant interest in hiking and cracks him open, makes him talk. He compliments the food, the house, the music playing gently in the background. 

There’s something else again in the way Locke’s glance slinks around the room, lingering in strange places. The way he watches every interaction between Dr. Linus and his father like it’s a tennis match he’s scoring or a play he needs to review. The way he slows down just a little as he passes by the bookshelf, reading all the spines. The way his eyes wander the room until he finds a family photo, the one of him and his father back when they lived on the island, and they dart back there every time they get a chance.

There’s something of a spy in him. A part of Dr. Linus is very concerned with what he’ll do with all this information he’s stealing. 

And then there are these moments when he’ll catch Dr. Linus’s eye, sneaky and warm, and Dr. Linus is overwhelmed by the feeling that the two of them are in cahoots, playing out two halves of some masterful conspiracy. He doesn’t know what it means. He enjoys it in a desperate sort of way.

The plates are cleared and soaking in the sink. Dr. Linus is portioning out leftovers, clearing down the stovetop. His father is having an early night. Locke, ever the overly-involved guest, is out in the backyard again, cleaning the grill. Dr. Linus will have to put a stop to that in a moment, but for now he just sits in quiet, in the relief of not having to worry about anyone.

In the kitchen, he opens up one of Locke’s beers and takes a long, serious drink.

It’s been years since he’s had a drink at home. 

He arrives in the backyard to find Locke seated atop the picnic table, feet on the bench, hands braced on the tabletop as he leans back, open to the black sky. He’s blissful as he gazes up into the stars.

“What is that?” he asks, pointing up. “Venus, do you think?”

Almost breathless, Dr. Linus answers, “I think so.”

“I was never much good at this,” Locke admits. “I know the North Star, obviously, and a handful of constellations, but after a while…” He tears his eyes from the heavens and glances back at Dr. Linus. He grins, sheepishly. “...it all starts to look the same. Sorry, I’m slacking off.” He jerks his thumb back towards the grill, still only half-cleaned.

“Don’t worry about it. You’re supposed to be a guest. You’ve already done more than enough. Speaking of which,” he holds up the six-pack, now a five-pack, “have a drink?”

“Please.” Locke pats the tabletop beside him, an invitation. “It’s all clear in there?”

“He’s having an early night, although between you and me,” Dr. Linus tells him as he clambers onto the table, “I think he may have felt like something of a third wheel. Leftovers are packed up. Please take some rolls with you when you go. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

“Has it been a while?” Locke asks.

“Hmm?”

“Since you entertained.”

“Oh. Yes.” Dr. Linus presses a cold beer into Locke’s hand, sips at his own. “My father’s health took a downturn a few years back. He had to move in with me, and...well, I wasn’t exactly a social butterfly to begin with.” The tab of Locke’s beer snaps loud. “I think he really enjoyed talking with you tonight. Thank you.” And then, “I’m sorry if…”

“No, no, no. Don’t apologize. I never really had family growing up. Only met my dad a few years ago. This kinda thing is...it’s nice.”

“Your mother was…?”

“Out of the picture. Pretty much from the word go.” He takes a sip. “She was a teenager. It was the 50’s. I can’t blame her for what she did. How she...protected herself. Dad was...he says he didn’t know I existed. Not sure I buy that. But he did track me down eventually. That’s something.”

“Do you have a...have you spent much time together?”

“We did. We did for a while. He took me hunting a lot. He’s, uh, he’s in a home now. It’s my fault, or I feel like it’s my fault. We were in an accident, the two of us. I broke my back, lost the use of my legs. He lost...everything. Can’t move, can’t speak. The lights are on, but nobody’s home.” He stretches his legs out long, so his feet dangle inches from the dry grass. “I have a lot to answer for.”

“I don’t know if that’s something you can hold yourself accountable for. Surviving. Or healing.”

“Maybe not. But I can sure try.” He takes a very deep, very slow breath. “There are worse things, I guess.” He nudges Dr. Linus gently. “OK, your turn.”

He lets out a small, startled laugh. “Good God. Are we in therapy?”

“If you like.” He grins, deep and wry. “Tell me about your mother, Dr. Linus.”

He giggles nervously into his beer. There are exchanges to be made here, he supposes. He has now in his hands a rough sketch of John Locke’s upbringing, painful and lonesome. Dr. Linus has to meet him halfway. Something must be parted with, something small. 

Dr. Linus takes a thin, unsteady breath. “I feel as though there isn’t much to say,” he begins. “My mother died when I was very young. My father raised me all on his own. We moved constantly, my father changed careers constantly, but he always put my education first. He put me through college. He helped me through grad school and my doctorate program. And I...appear to be squandering that in the public school system.”

He very deliberately moves his foot along the bench, so his boot presses against the side of Dr. Linus’s oxford shoe. “I disagree.”

“Well, you’re entitled to your opinion. Substitute.”

Locke bursts into a small, wheezing laugh that he hides in the crook of his elbow. He peers shyly over his arm when he asks, “You have memories of her? Your mother.”

Dr. Linus shakes his head. “When I say very young, I mean...minutes.” He plucks at his trouser leg. “She died in childbirth.”

There’s a warm kind of solemnity to him as he says, “I’m very sorry about that, Ben.”

“It’s...it’s very odd. Because I never knew her. I can’t miss her the way he misses her. The way people who knew her miss her. What I’m missing is...potential. The possibility of a mother, rather than…?” 

He looks to Locke, who nods. He’s watching Dr. Linus like he’s drinking in everything he says, like he’s glued to this. 

“My dad...things are good now. Things have been good for a long time. But I think it was difficult for him when I was young. Emotionally, I mean. He lost his wife and now he had this son who...who he didn’t understand.” 

_Who he didn’t like._ Ben can remember realizing this, that his father loved him, that his father cared for him, that his father wanted what was best for him, that his father would never like him.

He was about twelve, if he remembers right. 

“And I know he never intended for this to happen, but when I was very young, he would make me feel as though I had to apologize for what I’d done to my mother. Not that it was my fault; I don’t think either of us believed that. But I think my father was aware of some sort of balance in the world that was upset by me coming into it. My mother had to die so I could live. And I had to make that worthwhile. I had to justify to him why I was alive and she was dead.”

“That had to be hard.”

“It was infuriating. I…” There’s the roar of a plane passing someplace far overhead and it hits him like a bucket of water. He’s saying all this to Locke, to a stranger. “I’m sorry, I don’t know why I’m…”

“‘S OK,” Locke says. “I asked.”

“But I don’t...I love my father. We’re close.”

“I know you are. I could see that in there. You’re good to take care of him the way that you do.”

“I don’t know that it’s something I do because I’m good.”

“Even so. You’re doing it. That’s hard enough without getting into why.” Locke leans back again, braces his hands behind them. His left arm is close enough that Dr. Linus can barely feel the heat of it against his back. “Is it me, or are the stars brighter than usual?”

Dr. Linus can barely tear his eyes away.

* * *

Mr. Locke is still a substitute, at the end of the day.

What this means is, despite the fact that he’s essentially teaching biology full time, sometimes the school still needs a warm body at the head of a classroom to press play on Glory in American History class or supervise a study session, and if Locke has a free period, he is often that warm body. What this means is that there are moments during the day that Dr. Linus is accustomed to sharing with Mr. Locke, and these moments can be stolen.

Broadly speaking, Dr. Linus can accept this. These are the terms, and he can work within them.

But today, Locke is substituting for a gym teacher during Dr. Linus’s free period, and he’s willing to put up with the smell of old sweat and the echo of dodgeballs on the floor, for at least a little while, if it means sitting by Locke on the bleachers or walking with him along the sidelines.

It’s a matter of a few months now. He can’t waste a second.

When he arrives at the gym, someone’s already in his place. Locke’s seated on the lowest row of bleachers in a far corner of the gym, in hushed conversation with a large man who Dr. Linus has never seen before.

At the very edge of the bleachers, he steps up and up, until he’s just outside of their line of sight. He walks up to them like that along the bleachers, so they don’t notice him, so they’ll speak like he’s not there.

“...get what you’re saying, dude, and I think it’s totally noble,” the big man is saying, “but what I’m telling you and what you’re not hearing is that guilt is a real thing and you can’t just turn it off. You kinda have to process it naturally.”

Locke’s voice is uncharacteristically tense and sarcastic when he answers, “And what would I know about processing guilt?”

“A lot,” the man acknowledges. “But maybe not as much as he does. He had to...sit with that. Longer than you did, man, a lot longer.”

“Yeah,” Locke murmurs, running a hand along his scalp. He takes a long, very deep breath. “It just doesn’t feel right. Not doing anything about it when maybe I could do something to help.”

“Yeah, I get that. And that’s not really the part I have a problem with. The problem is: what if it doesn’t work out like you think it will in your head, and then you freak out and take it all personally? Because between you and me, dude, that’s how things blow up with you.” The man stands up from the bleachers with a soft grunt. “Literally, a lot of the time.”

Locke chuckles, small and wry. “Well, I set a deadline,” he says. “You’re free to bench me as you see fit after that point.”

The big man turns, thrusts his hands in his pockets. “Don’t need your permission, dude.”

“I know that. I’m just asking for your patience.”

“You got it, but like...you also need to be patient. And sometimes being patient means backing off. You know?” The big man glances past Locke, directly at Dr. Linus. “Later, dude.”

And then he walks. 

Locke turns and for just a moment, there’s alarm in his expression. But it’s gone after a second. He pats the bench beside him. “Didn’t expect you to be here.”

“Well, I had time,” Dr. Linus says, settling down next to Locke. “And as you know, I’m enormously enthusiastic about...sports?”

Locke’s eyes crinkle up, an almost-laugh.

“Who was that? I don’t think I’ve seen him here before. Another substitute?”

Locke shakes his head. “Old friend of mine. Runs a temp agency. Got me this job, as a matter of fact.”

“Job hunting already, John?”

“Not seriously. Not for a while,” Locke says. “It’s not even spring break yet.”

Spring break is a week and a half away. Dr. Linus’s heart sinks. 

* * *

When the bell rings on the final day, the school empties in seconds. Not completely: there are still the students who carefully clear out their lockers before they go, the students who have to wait for their parents to pick them up, the students who cluster on the lawn, not quite ready to say goodbye.

Dr. Linus falls in the camp of conscientious clearers, but it doesn’t take him long. His grades from the term are in, his comments were all written weeks ago and he’s watered the spider plant that sits on the corner of his desk enough to help it survive for the coming two weeks. He can go now, if he wants.

He goes to Mr. Locke’s classroom instead.

He’s busy, still. Not a surprise. The plants growing on the windowsill have grown bold and wild, snarling around each other and creeping up the windows and hanging tendrils down to snake across the counter and down over the cabinets. He appears to have a system in place: little glass bulbs stuck in the dirt, slowly eking water into the roots. Right now he’s bent over a wire cage, struggling with something.

He asks, “Anything I can do?”

Absently, Locke says, “Hold this,” and thrusts a rabbit into Dr. Linus’s hands. 

The rabbit stares up at him, eyes pink and glassy. Its nose twitches, hind legs kicking for purchase. Dr. Linus adjusts his grip, bundles the rabbit close to his chest. “Please tell me you’re not dissecting this one.”

“I can’t see that going over well,” Locke says as he cleans the cage. “No, Chester here is going home with Emma. She and her brother had a pet rabbit die on ‘em earlier in the year - thing was about 12 - so they already have all the stuff at home. Hutch in the backyard, that kinda thing.” He stands, nods at the rabbit in Dr. Linus’s arms. “Between you and me, I dunno if I’m getting that guy back.” 

“Is that a concern?”

“No, it’s fine by me. Can’t exactly take a rabbit where I’m going.”

“Australia?”

“Not until summer,” Locke assures him. “Just Oregon, for now.”

“Oh!” He’s maybe a little too loud. The rabbit jerks in his arms. “Where in Oregon?”

“Tillamook State Forest. Little early in the year for it, I know, but I only got so much time off and I’ve never been up there before. You know the area at all?”

My mother died there, he doesn’t say. A bit much, even for Locke, he feels, to talk about his mother collapsed among the leaves and roots, dying of an early son. “We’re from Portland, originally,” he says. “My father took me camping there a few times when I was young.” But never on that trail.

“Yeah, I think he mentioned that at dinner. That’s probably how I got it in my head. What about you, what are you up to these next couple of weeks?”

Hard to say to someone so certain of his own immediate future. He’ll rest. He’ll get some reading done. He’ll meet up with a few friends from college who have also gone into education. Who are far more successful. In a loose sense, he’ll do all that. 

He had an idea that Locke might come to dinner once or twice, but he won’t see Locke. Locke will be in Oregon. 

“Nothing so exciting,” he says at last. 

“Well, if you’re willing,” Locke says, “and not too busy, I could use a guide.”

“I’m not…” he stammers, smiles, collects himself. “I’m not equipped.”

His eyes glitter with a shy, peculiar warmth. “I could use company too. If you’re up to that.”

Well, he’s not up to that. He hasn’t been on a real hike in years, and he’s got his father to look after, and he’s got plans - thin and unexciting plans but plans - and he can’t just drop them.

Except, he can, he realizes suddenly. He’s not particularly eager to see those friends from college who are more successful than him, and he can carry books with him if he wants to read them so badly. His father needs help, needs looking after, but he needs independence too and the woman who he hires to look in on his father during the day could be paid to visit in the evening too. He hasn’t been on a real hike in years but his body would remember, as he walked. He could do all that, if he wanted to. If he wanted so badly to walk into the woods with a relative stranger, he could do that.

Dr. Linus clears his throat. “When did you say you’d be leaving?”

* * *

It’s curious, Dr. Linus thinks as he finds his footing on the steep rock face and pushes himself along, how things come back. When did he last climb a mountain? Undergrad, certainly. Every time he came home for break. Things were always a little unsteady when he’d return, between him and his father. They’d grown used to being on their own, to not having to accommodate each other. The hiking would help a little. By the time they got to the top of the mountain, they’d both come around a little to the idea of being father and son.

Since then, when? Grad school, a few times, with friends. A few times after that, with his father, on occasions when they saw each other.

Not since his father had to move in with him. Certainly not since then.

In the first mile of the first hike, Dr. Linus thought to himself, “This was a terrible mistake.” His breath came short, his legs grew rubbery and weak, there were still nine miles ahead of him and he knew, he knew he wouldn't make it. He would make a fool of himself. Locke would look back at him, wheezing in the first mile, and regret having asked him along. 

Instead, Locke’s pace slowed, relaxed. He paused from time to time to point out rare mushrooms and signs of animals that passed before them, and gave Dr. Linus the space he needed to identify edible plants and the calls of birds, and by the time it occurred to Dr. Linus that he’d gotten a second wind, they were already halfway there.

And now, he thinks as Locke crests the rock face and reaches down to pull Dr. Linus up the rest of the way, now it’s like he never stopped hiking. 

“Feeling alright?”

“Absolutely. You?”

“Just fine.” He stands upright, shoulders his pack. “Think we’re not far from the lookout.”

It’s comfortable, out here with Locke. Dr. Linus wasn’t sure if it would be, at first. All he knew was that time with Locke is a shrinking commodity and that he likes being around Locke and that Locke, perversely, seems to like being around him too. His concern was that they wouldn’t have much in common. 

They’re discovering that they’re both early risers, irrevocably awake by the time the sun crests the horizon. They’re finding a rhythm in the mornings when they stagger stiff-legged and sleepy around the campsite boiling water for coffee and cooking eggs for breakfast, in the afternoons when their footfalls seem to be part of the same stride, in the evenings when they gather close to the fire so the crackle of the wood won’t drown out their conversation.

He can be quiet with Locke. Not in the way that he used to be quiet with his father, where it became more chillingly apparent with each passing second that neither of them had anything to say. Quiet in a new way, warm and familiar. Like they don’t need to impress each other and they’ve said all that needs to be said.

It’s a little absurd. They haven’t known each other long.

They pick their way among mossy rocks and fiddleheads. Their steps are sure and careful. They don’t talk. So close to the top, speaking seems sacrilegious. 

Locke understands this.

The sight is startling. Not at first. At first, it’s just the weathered wooden sign nailed to a lichen-flecked tree, the one that says Elk Mountain Summit and tells them they are currently 2,788 feet above sea level, but then there’s the turn and the looking out, and that nearly knocks the wind out of Dr. Linus. It’s just the sight of it. A sky so bright it’s practically teal. A sea of trees laid out before them, green like he never saw green. The way the clouds ripple and the light shifts liquid up the side of one mountain, down the next, welling up in valleys and winking off of lakes.

In that absolute silence, Locke reaches for him. He balls up a fist in the back of Dr. Linus’s loose sweatshirt and just holds onto that, the barest kiss of his fingertips pushing through the fleece. Locke’s not looking at him, he finds. He’s just staring out at the view, expression calm and unreadable. His eyes are strange, pale blue-green with a ring around the fringe of the iris so dark it could be black.

Dr. Linus wonders when he last noticed someone’s eyes.

Quietly, boldly, he allows his hand to come to rest on Locke’s lower back. His t-shirt is damp from sweat, blazing from the heat of his skin.

They stay like that a while, until Locke lets go of him, flexes his hand sheepishly. “Ready to get moving?” he asks, looking down at Dr. Linus. “We’ve still got a ways to go.”

There’s something familiar about it. Something about trekking in the woods together, something about that shade of green, something about walking behind Locke and envying the certainty of his steps.

Maybe he dreamed about it.

* * *

Dr. Linus has assigned himself to fire duty. 

It’s a comfort thing, he supposes. His father had him collecting kindling when he was three, chopping wood when he was nine, taught him the ins and outs of a cooking fire before he was in his teens. It’s not that Dr. Linus doesn’t trust Locke to build a fire. It’s just that he trusts himself to build a fire, completely.

It’s a way he can contribute.

Bent low over his latest masterpiece, Dr. Linus is busily raking charcoal from one cook zone to the other when the hairs on the back of his neck start to lift and he turns to see Locke. He’s crouched close by, watching with interest, smiling with such intense affection that his eyes are nearly closed.

“Yes?” Dr. Linus says, suddenly flustered.

Locke asks him, “Where’d you get so good at this?”

The question is almost rhetorical in its sweetness.

And he could say, _My father taught me_ , or he could say, _I’ve been doing this for decades,_ but what he says, almost unbidden, is, “Would you believe I grew up on a deserted island?”

Flatly - but fondly - Locke answers, “No.”

“Well, I did.” He continues raking the coals with a faintly wounded diligence as he reconsiders. “I suppose _grew up_ is stretching it a little,” he admits. “I lived on a deserted island between the ages of 10 and 13. How’s that?”

“Well, those are big growing-up years,” Locke concedes.

“Deserted might be overselling it too. We did have houses. Indoor plumbing. My dad had a van. We weren’t exactly roughing it. But,” Dr. Linus adds, warming to his subject, “I learned a lot about edible tropical plants and how to tell if wild boar were in the area. And about building a cooking fire, of course. We weren’t allowed to go deep into the jungle, but my father would take me camping as close as we could get without passing through the sonar fence.”

Locke’s brow furrows. “Sonar fence?”

“To keep out the hostiles,” Dr. Linus blinks up at him. “I think that might be why we moved.”

Locke’s still watching him, still amused, still curious. “Are you having fun with me?”

“No. Well, yes, but I’m also telling the truth.” He throws on a little more kindling. “It was some sort of science expedition; I was never really...privy to the details of that. The man who ran it was a family friend. Gave my father a job. On reflection, I suppose it’s a strange way for a child to grow up.”

Locke studies him, considers deeply. “What do you miss most about it?” 

“Hmm?”

“Or don’t you miss it?” Locke asks. He’s taking foraged mushrooms from a bag, slicing them with idle care. “I guess I assumed you would.”

What does he miss? It was only a handful of years, patchily remembered and rarely reflected on. He mostly thinks of the island in the context of his father’s regrets, how he’ll worry at it like a sore spot. If they’d hung on, if they’d stayed put, what might the Dharma Initiative have made of his son?

Dr. Linus can’t guess. Perhaps not much of anything at all. The son of a workman, attending a one-room school. It’s not clear to him what the Dharma Initiative could have given him, if it ever would have welcomed him with open arms. But he nurtures a secret regret, twin to his father’s, when he remembers that wild, beautiful place. What would the _Island_ have made of him?

“I wasn’t given much freedom while I was there,” he reflects. “I was young and it was dangerous, extremely dangerous. But there was this…my father was deeply unhappy, while we were there. He came to the island looking for opportunity – for me and for him – but instead he felt ignored and isolated and…I bore the brunt of it. He’d admit to that, I think.” Dr. Linus chews his lip. “It’s not as though he was violent. Not physically. But there were days when, after school, I would stand out on the hill and stare deep into the jungle, into the spaces where the green would become so dark as to be black and I’d swear to myself that I’d leave all those people behind. That the next time he turned on me, I’d have the courage to run.”

He looks up, suddenly self-conscious. Locke will pity him now. Locke will recoil from the sadness, the ugliness of this.

Locke’s frozen in the act of chopping mushrooms, but there’s no pity in his face, no fear, not even any discomfort. Just a look of quiet, earnest understanding. Of immense care. That’s almost more uncomfortable.

“Never happened, of course. I’m not sure what I thought was out there. Just freedom, I suppose. Just _anything_ else.” He smiles, small and wry. “I’d like to go back as I am now. Meet the jungle on its own terms.”

Locke’s knife begins moving again. “You should,” he says, quite seriously. 

“I don’t even know where that island was. Somewhere in the South Pacific.”

“Where’d you fly into?”

“Nowhere. We took a submarine.” 

Locke’s sudden bark of laughter makes him jump. He selects another mushroom from the bag.

Lunging for a subject change, Dr. Linus asks, “You found those on the hike?”

“Yep. Boletes. Chanterelles. Some oyster mushrooms in there too.”

He eyes the mushrooms, their soft, peculiar shapes. “You’re quite certain of that?”

“Do I seem like the kinda guy who would feed you mystery mushrooms, Benjamin?”

“You’re asking my earnest opinion, _Jonathan_?”

He smiles to himself. “Just John,” he says. “They’re good. You’ll like them.”

Locke cooks the mushrooms in a skillet alongside a knob of butter and some kind of wild onion, pale green and chopped fine. They _are_ good. He _does_ like them. He would have appreciated an opportunity to be contrarian, to not be so completely taken with Locke. 

No such luck.

There’s a little warning for what comes next: a drab sunset, a starless evening sky, a few stray droplets marking the pages of Dr. Linus’s book as he reads curled up close by the fire. And Locke, suddenly restless. He clears up the cooking supplies, puts their packs inside the tent, wraps some of the spare kindling in a tarp, and Dr. Linus is just about to thank him for clearing up after dinner when he abruptly douses the fire in a bucketful of water.

Dr. Linus sits bolt upright, startled and faintly splashed. “I was still using that,” he snaps.

“I know. I just wanna make sure the job gets done,” he says. And then, “You oughta close your book.”

At that moment, the sky ruptures. The raindrops fall sudden and hard, pattering off their heads and shoulders, turning the ground to mud. Dr. Linus yanks his hood over his head, stuffs his book up under his jacket, and sprints for the tent. He practically falls in, boots still hanging out the door. He lets them hang long enough to loosen the laces so he can kick them off and put them in a corner.

When he peeks out through the flap, he sees Locke standing in the middle of the campsite, head tipped back, beatifically smiling as he opens his arms to the rain.

“Get in!” Dr Linus calls to him. “You must be freezing.”

“I am, a little,” he admits as he crawls into the tent, dripping. “You don’t enjoy that? Even a little bit?”

Dr. Linus considers the adrenaline in his blood, the giddy feeling in his chest. Perhaps a little bit.

They change back to back, another little routine they’ve developed. When Dr. Linus turns around with his wet hair and his boxers and his faded college t-shirt, feeling vaguely shelled, Locke is kneeling by the tent flap, squeezing his shirt out into the puddle forming outside their door.

Locke’s bare back is streaked angry, orderly red. A long line up his back. A shorter, horizontal line on the left side of his lower back, right where Dr. Linus let his hand fall at the lookout. An irregular, circular pockmark marring the keen perfection of that line.

“Those are surgical scars?” Dr. Linus can’t stop himself from asking.

Locke startles a little, peers back at Dr. Linus over his shoulder. He thinks about his answer for one second, another. At last, he says, “Most of ‘em.”

“Not all?”

“Not all.”

“Is there a story behind the ones that aren’t surgical?” he asks.

Locke sets his damp t-shirt aside, pulls a dry one from his pack and drags it over his head. “Not one I’m ready to tell.”

So that’s that. 

The earth is freezing through the floor of their tent, so cold that their sleeping bags can’t quite save them from it. Locke unfurls a third sleeping bag from the very bottom of his pack and unzips it completely, lays it across the floor like a picnic blanket or a carpet. It helps. It helps enough. 

They settle atop it, less than a foot of space between their bodies. Dr. Linus turns the damp pages of his book, picking out what he can by the glow of a headlamp while the rain hammers on the tent over his head. 

Locke watches him, sleepy and content.

* * *

_They’re sitting beside each other on the sleeping bag, and from here on out, it feels like anything could happen._

_What he’s conscious of, more than anything, is John’s fragility. The knives, the scarred hands, the stink of blood: it’s a front. He’s breakable in ways Ben can scarcely imagine. And he’s in Ben’s hands now, trusting in spite of everything._

_He’s in Ben’s hands, and what Ben would like to do is hold him a little while longer. He’d like to rest his hand on that broad back and not be shrugged away. He’d like to drag back the sheets (there’re no sheets) and put him to bed. He’d like to tell him that everything will be alright and be believed, just one more time._

_But, he realizes, it won’t shake out that way._

_He can’t hesitate. He’ll have second thoughts. He misses John already, before the cord has a chance to close around his neck._

_It takes forever. It should have been easy – it is easy, Ben’s hands are strong and John can barely make a sound before his airway is cut off – but it takes forever. The plastic cord slices into John’s strong neck, the white palms of Ben’s hands. John thrashes, twists, brings them both to the floor, but Ben holds on, presses his forehead to the leg of a table (there’s no table) and squeezes his eyes shut and pulls the cord tighter and tighter and tighter and -_

* * *

There’s a howl in the dark: ragged, primal and insane.

He’s frantic, scrambling blind as he struggles against the constriction of his sleeping bag, as he claws his way across the floor of the tent, desperate to escape from whatever’s making that awful noise. And now something’s pushing on him, something’s holding him down. He lashes out in the total darkness, connects with something warm that cries out when he strikes it. Dr. Linus rolls flat on his stomach and crawls for the flap of the tent. He doesn’t get far before something’s dragging him backward, something’s pinning his arms flat to his sides, something’s holding him tight, somebody’s shouting in his ear, _“Ben, stop! Ben!”_

He stops fighting. He breathes in slowly.

It’s still dark. The rain still rattles on the roof of their tent. The air is humid and cold. He smells sweat, leather, the faintest strains of an aftershave he recognizes. He’s in Locke’s lap, clamped back against Locke’s chest. His heart beats fast, frantic, struggling like a rabbit in a trap.

Dr. Linus exhales, long and slow. 

Locke loosens his grip just slightly. Unnecessarily, he says, “You were screaming.”

“I’m so sorry,” he says. Rasps. His throat is raw.

Locke releases him with one arm long enough to find a water bottle and press it into Dr. Linus’s nerveless hands. “You don’t have to be sorry.”

“I didn’t hit you, did I?”

“No.” He is very definitely lying about that. His voice has the warmest burr to it, thick with sleep. “Don’t worry about it. I used to have dreams like that all the time.”

“What?”

“Night terrors. Right?”

“Oh.” Dr. Linus brings up one hand to rub at his eyes. His cheek is wet under his fingertips. Worse and worse. “I suppose that’s what they are. I’ve been having a lot of intense dreams lately.”

“What about? If you don’t mind me asking.”

 _About you,_ he doesn’t say. _They’re all about you._ “I think I do mind.”

He feels Locke shrug around him, the roll of his muscles, the brush of his skin. “Fair enough,” Locke says. “Just know that you can, if you’d like to. I kinda got a knack for interpreting dreams.”

It’s an odd claim to hear from someone so physical, so enthused by the mysteries the natural world offers up, so consciously made from meat and bone. “Did you pack your crystal ball, John?”

He chuckles softly, gives Dr. Linus a gentle squeeze. “Nah, I travel light. But I might be able to make a guess at what your head’s trying to tell you.”

The concept of having to explain that terrible dream to Locke, of having to watch his face turn cold and closed off the longer Dr. Linus struggles to explain himself, to make it sound less hideous…”It’s a generous offer, John, but I think I’ll decline.”

“Suit yourself,” he says.

Dr. Linus’s eyes adjust by degrees to the darkness in the tent. By now, he can see the muddled form of his sleeping bag, crumpled on the floor. He can see the shadows of trees thrashing through the sides of the 

“What time is it?”

Locke twists his wrist around, squints at his watch in the dark. “About two.”

“No point in calling it an early wake-up call, then?”

A soft puff of air against the back of his neck. “No.”

“I’m sorry, John,” he murmurs. “You’re so at home out here and I feel as though I’ve been a burden for you.”

“Don’t apologize. I meant what I said earlier. This’d be…a different trip if you hadn’t come along with me. A lonelier trip.” His voice becomes softer and shyer. “I’m glad you’re here.”

It’s overwhelming, the need to reach for him, to hold onto him like he did at the lookout, like he failed to do in the dream and every day up until now. He satisfies himself with a hand on Locke’s knee, a gentle squeeze through his trousers.

The tiny, breathless catch in his throat is strangely gratifying. There’s a flutter in Locke’s heartbeat where it beats against his back, a shift in the way he sits. Discomfort. Alarm. A step too far.

Dr. Linus takes his hand off Locke’s knee.

An imperceptibly small exhalation: a sigh of relief, he imagines. Locke seems to feel the need to brush away the strangeness of the moment. He chafes at Dr. Linus’s upper arms, warming him with the friction of his callouses. “Cold out here, huh?” he says, like it’s the preamble to, _Better get back in your own sleeping bag before you catch your death._

Dr. Linus asks him, “Why’d you bring me out here with you, John?”

The question seems to throw him off his easy stride, just a little. He takes a dry, serious little breath that ruffles the hair on the back of Dr. Linus’s head. “I was coming out here anyway,” he says, carefully factual, “and when I asked if you wanted to come along, you said yes.”

“But why did you ask me? Because we don’t know each other, John. We’re barely more than strangers.”

He can feel Locke’s heart thud hard against his back. “Well,” he begins. And then he’s quiet, considering. Dr. Linus wonders if he truly needs to think about why, if he just needs to find the way to say it, if he’s hunting for a lie. He wonders if he’d be able to tell if he twisted around and looked him in the face. 

“Because I like you, Ben,” he says at last. “You’re intelligent, you’re passionate, you’re interesting, and I like being around you.” His voice takes on a wounded kind of quality. “Why’d you agree to come along, if you feel that way?”

Dr. Linus wrenches himself in Locke’s grip, a retort on his lips, but even he’s not sure what it is. _Because I’ve never had a stranger ask me to come out into the woods with him. Because I was curious. Because you keep saying you’ll go away forever and I’m not ready to say goodbye to you yet. Because I haven’t had a friend, a real friend, in so long and I’m not sure if that’s what this is. Because I only just found you again and not seeing you for two weeks sounds miserable. **What do you want from me, exactly?**_

All those possibilities die on eye contact. Something about Locke’s face in the dark: the lines etched deep in his face, the silvery bristle of his two-day stubble, the pained hunger in his eyes.

Ben slides a hand up to cradle his weather-beaten jaw and means to tell him that he likes being around him too, that he’s sorry he put that pain in his eyes even if he doesn’t quite understand it, but instead he kisses him. 

John gasps against his mouth, and for a moment it occurs to Ben that kissing a strange man while stranded in the middle of the woods is a risky proposition and maybe he should be backing off now, maybe he should be blaming sleep deprivation, maybe he should be apologizing. But that’s before John tightens around him, a small and needy shockwave, and that’s before John’s hand slides heavy and warm up his back to snag fingers in Ben’s hair and that’s before he leans in.

It all happens very fast, then, like when a dam breaks and the water comes rushing in and it levels houses, buries towns. Suddenly he’s on his back on the wet tent floor and, for a second, he feels like he could drown here. But then John’s on him again, John’s stubble is rasping against his cheek, John’s hand is raking through his hair and the world kind of narrows, simplifies: just hold on. 

He throws one arm across that broad back, scrabbles at John’s shirt until it rides up high and there’s warm skin under his fingertips. The other rests at the base of his skull, thumb grazing his pulse. He tries to pull John down, flat, until there’s no air left between them.

_If I drown, you drown._

John resists the pull, yanks Ben’s t-shirt up and lets his rough palm graze over Ben’s soft stomach, searching, caressing, stalling for time before his hand plunges beneath the waistband of Ben’s shorts and curls around him, eager and warm.

The noise Ben makes into John’s mouth is sharp surprise, makes his heels kick out against the sleeping bag as he arches up into John’s hand.

John breaks away from him with the press of his forehead. His eyes are shining, wet in the dark, and his mouth is open like he means to ask, _“Are you OK?”_ or, _“Do you want this?”_ and Ben can’t bear to hear any questions from him, can’t bear to come up with answers, so he just reaches for the front of Locke’s pants and whatever questions he might have had die right there, right then.

He sinks into it, into Ben’s touch, and as their mouths meet again, Ben feels suddenly very important. The way John’s breath catches as Ben navigates his waistband and takes hold of him, the way John’s already hard and hot and painfully ready for him, the way his whole body jerks into Ben’s grip and Ben can feel him, the flex of the muscles in his back under Ben’s palm, the break of the rhythm in his hand on Ben’s cock, the suppressed whine – humid and breathy – against Ben’s ear. 

He wants to string this out, make it last too long, shatter John’s calm persona so badly he can’t pretend anymore. He wants to bite him. He wants to hold him. He holds tight to John’s hip, lets his fingernails sink in over the spot where the scar is on his lower back. His face is hot. His jaw is sore. It can’t stop. He can’t let it stop.

He comes just then with a high-pitched keen and a jagged string of desperate thrusts into John’s hand and he thinks to himself, _Well, this is embarrassing,_ but John doesn’t seem to think so at all. He’s still got his fingers snagged in Ben’s hair and he’s pulling, just a little. His hand still moves, guiding Ben through the last few pulses with a patient hand. He’s still pushing into Ben’s hand, hips losing their steady rhythm as he grows closer, as Ben makes his grip tighter and tighter and…

He shudders, growls in Ben’s ear as he tips over the edge. 

It takes them both a little while to find themselves again. For Ben, it’s the sounds of the rain that filter back in first, then the shadow of a wet leaf glued flat to the outside of their tent, then John moving beside him. He’s got one hand pressed to his forehead, eyes shut, expression unreadable. Ben watches him, jaw tense, and waits.

What John does, at last, is wipe his hand on his pants, pull them up so he’s covered again, and Ben follows suit. Then he pushes Ben over just a little, so they’re both on the unfurled sleeping bag, no modest foot of space between them. Then John sits up and pulls his own sleeping bag into his lap. He works quickly, unzipping down the side until it opens up, flat and square. He throws it over the pair of them and settles down beside Ben before drawing it up to their chins.

“You’re OK?” he asks, inching tentatively closer to Ben under the covers, so their shoulders touch.

“Of course,” Ben murmurs, reaching for his hand. “Of course I am.”

His sleep is dreamless.

* * *

The morning dawns gray and weak, and Locke is not beside him. Dr. Linus takes a quiet inventory: the blanket folded around him, his sleeping bag tossed in the corner, his waterlogged book. 

There’s a leak in the tent somewhere. The sleeping bag beneath him is wet.

He puts his boots on and staggers out into their bedraggled, destroyed campsite and there’s Locke kneeling in the wet earth, doing his best with the kindling he saved last night to boil water for coffee. He looks up at Dr. Linus, eyes creased and fond and no different from before last night. “Mornin’,” he says, cordially as he passes Dr. Linus a tin camp mug. “You sleep through the rest of the night OK?”

“I did.” His instinct is to add, _Thank you,_ but that feels oddly perverse, as though what happened last night was a service, a sleep aid. 

“I was thinking we could try out that coastal trail today,” Locke says. “But if you’re feeling a little run down, we could take it easy. Do some fishing, maybe.”

Dr. Linus tries to imagine what that would be like. Cold and wet, lakes and rivers swollen up past their borders. Locke’s hands, sure and sturdy on a line. The two of them, shoulder to shoulder or back to back, in perfect silence for hours on end. The absolute horror of what might shatter such a silence. His distaste for being burdensome wins out. “No, I think I’d like a hike today.”

Locke pours him coffee, hot and dark. “If you’re up for it,” he says.

He’s not, precisely. His hamstrings are tight. There are raw spots on his feet. Dr. Linus applies bandages, doubles up on socks. He’s ready before Locke is, waiting with his pack balanced across his knees as Locke laces up his boots. 

The earth is wet, bruised and battered but coming alive again. The leaves on the trees are fresh, vibrant, slick. The view from the trail is tremendous: blue sea, black rocks, white foam. But he’s watching Locke.

He’s searching for anything, some form of recognition. A warm glance, an intimate touch, a sheepish half-smile, an “About last night…” but it never comes. At the end of their walk, they stride out on a beach with sand as hard-packed as cement and stare out into the waves: cold, misty, unforgiving. When Dr. Linus puts a hand on his back, Locke barely seems to notice.

That night, they bed down in their sleeping bags, an appropriate foot apart.

It’s as though nothing happened at all.

* * *

Dr. Linus loses himself in work. 

It is spring term, after all, and most of his students are juniors and seniors. The juniors are nervous, driving up their grades as best they can before they have to start thinking too seriously about college. The seniors are checked out and waiting on college admissions, halfway between cutting school altogether and having a nervous breakdown. Alex has only been _physically_ present at history club this past week, her mind abuzz with nervous thoughts of Yale. 

These kids need his help. Extra study sessions. Extra reassurance. Extra attention.

So there’s no time to think about Locke. It’s fine that he’s barely spoken to Locke since they returned from Oregon. 

In a sense, it’s fine. 

In a sense, that’s down to him. Because Dr. Linus doesn’t use the men’s room at the other end of the school anymore, and Dr. Linus takes whichever stairwell happens to be most convenient when he leaves for the day. He’s not sure what he’s expecting. For Locke to close the gap, maybe. It’s immature, he knows.

And it’s not as though they don’t speak. It’s not as though they’re not friendly. It’s not that Locke doesn’t diligently arrive at his classroom door each day to walk him to the teacher’s lounge for lunch. 

It’s just that that’s all they are. They talk about classes, about testing, about work. They eat lunch elbow to elbow. That’s all. It’s as though all the clocks have been turned back to the beginning. Perhaps before the beginning: there was a warmth to Locke from the start that’s guarded, secret now. 

“Dinner at my place?” Dr. Linus asks under his breath as they walk back from lunch. “Friday?”

A sharp intake of breath. “Friday’s no good.”

“Saturday, then?”

Locke hesitates, slow and painful. At last, he says, “It’s not a good idea, Ben.”

And before Dr. Linus can say anything like, “Why?” or, “That’s not what I mean,” or, “Did I do something wrong?” he abandons Dr. Linus in the crowded hallway. It’s a very effortless casting-off.

He’s not proud of what he does next.

It’s just that he’s aware that Dr. Arzt takes the science department out to a happy hour once a month, always at the same bar. And he’s aware, also, that Locke always attends in an obligatory sort of way: he sits, he drinks exactly one beer, he is friendly, and he leaves. Dr. Linus has heard enough of Arzt’s complaints – that he stays so briefly, that he shows up at all – to be conscious of this ritual.

Arzt isn’t hard to bribe. He’s full of small, craven grievances and desires. All it takes is for Dr. Linus to agree to flesh out Arzt’s end-of-year student comments from a set of bullet points, and he’s lying to Locke about the location of the next science department happy hour.

It’s a brewpub. A nice one, or so Dr. Linus hears. He hasn’t actually been before. 

He arrives early, takes a seat at one end of the bar and plops his messenger bag on the barstool beside him. He perches a little uneasily, the vest he’s wearing today is a little constricting and he’s not willing to loosen his tie. As though that will make or break this. 

He orders a beer, nurses it tentatively. He keeps his eyes on the door while trying to pretend he isn’t watching the door. He twists a napkin between his fingers.

It’s still early in the evening when Locke shows up. Dr. Linus gets to watch his face, at first serene and benevolent as he scans the room for his coworkers, a gentle bolt of recognition as his eyes fall on Dr. Linus, a second bolt of alarm when it registers with him that it’s Dr. Linus, it’s just Dr. Linus, and a grim, cold understanding as he figures out why he’s here. It’s funny, almost.

To his credit, Locke doesn’t retreat. He crosses the room and comes right up to Dr. Linus, rests his arm on the bar beside him. Almost to himself, he says, “I guess I should’ve seen this coming.”

Dr. Linus wonders what he could possibly mean by that. He removes his bag from the stool. “Take a seat, John.”

Warily, Locke pulls out his barstool. He climbs up with the slow, deliberate, sharp-jawed intensity of a man climbing a scaffold. He sits with his elbow on the bar, his eyes staring straight into Dr. Linus’s, and Dr. Linus meets him, unflinching.

Dr. Linus brushes aside his twisted napkin. “Will you order something, John?”

“I think you better just tell me why we’re here.” He says it like a therapist, that icy brand of professional kindness.

“I would’ve thought it was obvious.”

At last, Locke lowers his gaze, suddenly shy or shameful. “Yeah, I guess it is.” He runs a hand over his forehead, over his skull, like he’s sweeping back imaginary hair. He leans forward at the bar, fixes his clear, bright eyes on Dr. Linus. “OK. You wanna start?”

Dr. Linus wasn’t quite expecting to be given the first move like this. Somehow, he thought he’d be met with excuses. He begins, “You’ve been avoiding me since Oregon.”

“Ben, we talked this morning.”

“And you were very polite this morning. You’ve been polite to me every single day since we got back from Oregon, not including weekends. But I think it’s pretty clear, John, that things have changed between us.”

Locke’s sinking a little into himself, leaning into his hand, mouth hidden.

“And I’m not…I’m not under any illusions that things could remain the same between us after what happened.” It occurs to him. “Perhaps you were?”

He winces. 

“All that aside, I suppose what I’d like to know is…if I’ve made things difficult between us. Because I’m fond of you, John, and I think we’ve become good friends these past few months. It’d help me to understand if I’ve done something to make that friendship impossible.”

Locke’s already shaking his head. “No. No, no no. You haven’t done anything wrong.” He moves as if to take Dr. Linus by the wrist but then hesitates, hand hanging in the air for a moment before he lets it drop uselessly back to the bar. “This is me,” he says at last. “This is all my fault.”

“What does that mean, exactly?”

He takes a deep, shuddering breath. “I’m here…You know, you’re right. We did become friends. And I wanna be a friend to you, Ben. That’s been so much easier than I thought it would be.” 

Dr. Linus isn’t certain whether that’s meant to be a compliment.

He’s rubbing at his brow. “I had you at a disadvantage, Ben. I’ve had you at a disadvantage this whole time. You didn’t do anything wrong. I’m the one who made a mistake.”

“I think I can be trusted to decide whether I’ve made a mistake or not. Or if I’ve been taken advantage of.”

Locke’s shaking his head, shaking his head. “It felt…right in the moment, but I…it was a mistake. You’re like nobody I’ve ever met in my life, Ben. And I lost sight of why I’m here.”

“Why _are_ you here, John? I’ve never really understood that. You’re not a teacher. You don’t have any expertise. You don’t want the job. I can’t imagine why you’re still here instead of anyone remotely qualified.”

“I’m here to help you.” He says it so desperately. 

“I don’t know what this is, John.” Dr. Linus slides off his barstool and onto the floor, throwing his bag over his shoulder. “But I’m confident that I don’t need your help.”

“Ben.”

He sighs, stares deep into Locke’s pale, sad eyes. “You know, John, I’m starting to think you’re right. Maybe we shouldn’t even be speaking.”

He sighs, deeply, jaggedly. Dr. Linus is already walking away when he hears him say, softly, “You’re right. It’s better that way.”

Dr. Linus hadn’t wanted him to say that. He’s not sure what he wanted Locke to say. Not that. 

But he doesn’t pause and he doesn’t look back.

They’re polite still, at work the next day. Even more polite than before, if that’s possible. They say good morning. They hold doors. Locke brews his own tea and has the decency to not try to walk Dr. Linus to lunch. Dr. Linus faintly despises him for it.

He feels peculiar, numb, empty as he glances around the teacher’s lounge and finds Locke isn’t there for lunch. But, he thinks, emptiness just means more space for other things.

He returns to his empty classroom in the space between lunch and fourth period to find Alex sitting there in the dark, twisting an envelope in her hands. Her Converse shoes squeak on the floor as she swivels gently back and forth.

“Alex?” he says, flipping the light switch and throwing the room into harsh fluorescent relief. “Is everything alright?”

She shifts forward in her chair, hair falling in her face. “I got a letter today.” Her voice is raspy, small with grief. She clears her throat. “From Yale.”

“Oh,” he sighs. He wishes he could shut the lights off again. He approaches her, her hunched shoulders, her huddled little form, with a kind of caution he feels should be reserved for a frightened animal or a bomb. He comes close, very close, and sinks down to his knees. He’s not exactly sure who takes whose hand. “Oh, Alex, I am so sorry.” He’s staring at her shoes still, the frayed laces. He can’t bear to see her face. “I know you had your heart set on that school. And I can’t…I can’t imagine what kind of foolish, small-minded bureaucrat saw fit to deny you admission, because Alex, you are the brightest, most motivated student I’ve ever had and you will do amazing things no matter where you go.”

“I got in.”

He glances up, sees her mouth quiver as she suppresses a smile. “You what?”

She can’t help it anymore; her face breaks out in a bright grin. “I got in. I’m going to Yale.”

“You’re a monster,” he’s able to say before she throws her arms around his neck. 

* * *

Spring goes so quickly. Dr. Linus has always felt that. A mad rush of assigning papers and grading papers, devising tests, giving tests, and grading tests. He’s finished his own grading and teachers’ comments. He’s finished Arzt’s comments, for all the cold satisfaction that brings him. And now there’s this peculiar feeling that comes with having nowhere to go and very little to do, a vast chasm of unspoken-for time lying before him. 

Not fully unspoken for. There are a few landmarks lying ahead of him: the handful of weeks in late June and early July that he’ll spend teaching for Summer Institute for the Gifted, the mountains of books to read, the conference in San Francisco. He’ll meet friends there. He missed spring break, after all. 

He’d say he wasted spring break, but that feels wrong to even think, too sharp-edged and awful.

He and Locke don’t speak to each other anymore. Genuinely, they don’t. Perhaps it shouldn’t surprise him – that was the plan, after all – but he didn’t expect Locke to respect his wishes so thoroughly. Something about the earnest brightness of his smiles, the spontaneity in the way he would reach out and touch, made Dr. Linus believe he wouldn’t be able to help himself. That he’d forget they ever fought and slide back into their old habits, chattering warmly at the lunch table, clapping Dr. Linus on the shoulder to punctuate a sentence.

Unfortunate, how enticing that prospect is. 

It’s just that he hasn’t had anything like this before now. He’s never been drawn to someone like Locke before, never felt so intensely in sync with someone so different from him. Nobody like Locke has ever been so drawn to him before, so instantly fond. Very few people are instantly fond of Dr. Linus. It’s not so strange, then, that he misses it for what it was, in spite of how it ended.

But if this was never a part of the first half of his life, it should be easy enough to do without for the second.

He can do without John Locke. 

So when he finds himself walking down the empty hallway to Locke’s classroom, he has to tell himself that this is just a polite farewell. Although, if that were true, he wouldn’t have this fear in him that Locke won’t be in his classroom or that he will be.

It wouldn’t mean so much to turn the corner and see him there, arms loaded with potted plants, their vines trailing over his shoulders, down his arms, as far down as to bounce against his thighs as he walks. 

He wouldn’t have felt the need to close the door behind him.

Locke freezes when he sees Dr. Linus, fixes him with a curious stare. He doesn’t drop the pots.

Dr. Linus could say many things here. He could offer to help, which would be gentlemanly, a burial of the proverbial hatchet. He could make a savage little dig about how he can see Locke in a garden center already. He could simply walk away. What he says, in a small voice, is “You’re going?”

Locke nods. 

“Now?”

Locke sets the plants down. “Soon.”

“Will you at least stay for graduation tomorrow?”

“I don’t think I can.” He smiles, small and wry. “Most of my kids are freshmen and sophomores anyway. Doesn’t mean to them or me what it must mean to you. You’ve had these kids all four years; you’ve been involved in their lives, even if some of them aren’t the best students. It must be like seeing off your own kids.”

“In a sense,” he says. And then, with the faintest note of smugness, “Alex got into Yale.”

Locke breaks into a smile, genuine and familiar. “You must be so proud.”

“I am. Although I don’t know how much of that pride is rightfully mine. She’s a…phenomenally gifted scholar. And a wonderful person. She could have gone anywhere she wanted.”

“You don’t get good students without good teachers. In my experience.”

 _Blackmail helps too_ , Dr. Linus remembers fondly. But he’ll take the compliment. Something about Locke being kind, but not polite, makes him want to believe Locke means it. He plucks at the green, slick leaf of a plant, a flower with one broad, waxy red petal. “I’m going to miss her terribly,” he admits.

“It’s a long way to Connecticut,” Locke allows. “You think you won’t see her again?”

“Oh, I’m certain I will, on breaks and things. I’m a…I suppose I’m a friend of the family, at this point,” he says with a faint note of surprise. “But I’ve grown very accustomed to having her in class. It won’t be the same next year.”

“No. I suppose not.”

“Are you sure I can’t convince you to stay?”

“And do what?”

“ _Teach_ , John. You’re good at it. Genuinely, you’re good at it. You talk to these students like they’re adults; you make them feel like their interests matter. You’re enthusiastic about your subject and you’re creative in the way that you teach it. Get a degree. I’ll help you get a degree. You have so much to offer these kids, and you like it. I can see that you like it.” He’s out of breath, suddenly. “You care about this the way I care. People don’t do that.”

“What is it they say?” Locke asks. “Those that can’t do, teach?”

Dr. Linus scowls up at him.

“I’ve spent a lot of my life worrying about what people said I couldn’t do,” Locke says, by way of explanation. “I try to move past it, but it’s hard to not feel pinned down by things like that.”

Up until recently, he wouldn’t have been able to imagine Locke pinned down by anything, threatened by anyone’s expectations. He can now. He doesn’t understand it, but he can imagine it.

“When I said you shouldn’t be teaching,” Dr. Linus confesses, “it was because I wanted to hurt you.”

“I know,” he says. 

“You know?”

“People aren’t perfect,” he says. “Well, Ben. You’ve made me your offer. Here’s my counteroffer.” He holds tight to it, struggling with the idea. “What if you come with me?”

“With you?”

“On walkabout. To Australia. Just the two of us.”

It’s an idea he wants to sink his teeth into. Because he likes that, the idea of the two of them alone in a wild place. He likes the idea of being someplace where no one knows them and living off the earth, honest and simple and a little bit dangerous. He wants that for a moment.

But only for a moment. He’s not insane. “Well…I can’t, John,” he says.” I’m a public school teacher; I don’t have the money to run off to Australia. I can’t leave my father on his own for weeks. I haven’t trained to be in the Australian outback for weeks. There’s no space in my life for this. I don’t even understand how there’s space in your life for this. It doesn’t make sense.”

Locke breathes a deep, rattling sigh. “Yeah,” he says, rubbing at his brow. “I guess it is getting kind of implausible.”

“What?”

“All this. This whole…How was I paying for all these trips on a substitute teacher’s budget?” He ruffles the leaves of a plant. “All this stuff for my classes? Even my recovery time. What did I say, two or three weeks and I was up and walking again? You’re the smartest man I know, Benjamin. That must have seemed very strange to you.”

And it had, it had seemed strange, but there’s something unearthly about Locke, something so comfortable that questioning him would be almost embarrassing. He decides to embarrass himself. “John, what are you talking about?”

“I don’t need you to understand, Ben, if you’re not ready to understand. But I’d like to be honest with you before I go. As honest as I can be.”

“Then be honest. Please.”

Locke takes him by the shoulders, holds him steady. He shuts his eyes tight for a moment and then opens them, stares deep into Dr. Linus. 

“I spent so much time wishing that you could be the man you said you were,” he begins. “And now you are. You are exactly the person you say you are, all the time. I like who you’ve become here, Ben, I really do. I shouldn’t have tried to meddle with that. I told myself that this was for you, but it was for me. And I’m very, very sorry for that.” 

“I don’t think I understand, John.”

Locke releases him. “It’s OK, Ben. I just want you to know that it’s been one of the great pleasures of my life to get to know you better.” 

He holds out his hand. Ben takes it.

His hand is warm. It’s rough. It’s familiar. They’ve done this before.

 _Of course,_ he thinks, _we shook hands when we first met._

But they’ve done this before. 

He can remember it now, he can remember the blood on his face, the adrenaline in his veins, how hot that stupid parka was. He had just lost his daughter and the grief was tearing at him like an animal and John was the only one who told him, “Sorry.” He and John were saying farewell for what was supposed to be the last time and he’d wanted to make a gesture. A passing of the torch.

He wanted to touch someone else.

As though reciting a memorized passage or the lyrics to a song, Ben says, “I’m sorry I made your life so miserable.” And then, “I’ve often wished that could have been the last time we saw each other.”

John’s jaw drops, just a little. When he finds his voice again, he asks, “When did you wake up?”

“Just now.”

“Is everything OK?” he asks.

Ben drags him forward by the hand, throws his free arm around John’s neck. He doesn’t resist. He might be too surprised to resist, too horrified. Ben finds he doesn’t particularly care. He drags John close, chest to chest, and he shudders there before clasping Ben tightly, squeezing him too hard.

“What are you doing here, John?” Ben asks into the crook of his neck.

“I’ll tell you about it.” John pushes away, looks him in the face again. His eyes are slightly wet. “You want to go for a walk?”

“I’d like that,” Ben says.

He knows something’s different the moment he cracks the classroom door. The sudden heat and humidity. The calls of birds. The buzzing of flies. When Ben opens the door, he sees the jungle, at once wild and familiar. 

Ben looks back over his shoulder at John. “It’s real?”

He shrugs. “Real as anything else.”

Together, they step through.

Right away, there’s grass and soft earth under his feet, hot sun on the back of his neck. It’s just as he remembers it. Just as he knew it, all his long, long life. 

He looks over to find John standing very still, basking in the warm air. 

“You were buried here,” Ben tells him. “Did you know that?”

John opens one eye to give him a quizzical stare. “No. I didn’t know that.” He pushes his hands into his pockets, thinks about it a little while. “Guess I’d rather be here than anywhere else in the world. I’m not gonna thank you for it, though.”

“I wouldn’t,” Ben agrees.

John makes a sweeping gesture at the jungle ahead of them. “Shall we?”

They start walking. Ben thinks about all the times they’ve walked together before: to the cabin, to the pit, to the barracks with his hands bound, to the Orchid station one last time. He was scheming, always, grasping for a way forward, a next move. He was hiding, always, trying to make it seem as though the way forward was clear to him.

This feels more like Oregon. Like neither of them have anything to prove.

But the silence seems to sit uneasily with John, it seems. Gently brushing against Ben’s shoulder as they walk, he says. “It feels like I made a mess of things, Ben.”

“Well, John,” Ben answers, staring straight ahead, “it wouldn’t be the first time.”

A thin, tiny wheeze. Ben turns to find John laughing at himself, grinning with the kind of hopeless fondness he’s become accustomed to over the past month. “I really missed you.”

“Is that why you’re here? Because you missed me?”

“No,” he says, and then, “Maybe.” A few quiet seconds of trudging, of grass trampled flat under their feet. “I could let go of everything. My anger at my dad. My anger at myself. Even my anger at you. And I was angry with you, Ben.” He swipes a hand across his mouth. “You really…” 

“I was unkind,” Ben acknowledges. 

“Unkind is a funny way of putting it.” 

“Alright.” Ben searches for a less funny way of putting it. “I wanted you dead. If it makes you feel any better, I’ve always thought that if I didn’t find the entire prospect of you so terrifying, John, we could have been very good friends.”

John comes to a stop. He’s looking at Ben with a kind of relief. “I kinda thought that myself.”

It’s uncomfortable, being looked at in that way. As though so much hung on his affirmation. Nothing he says should matter to John anymore. “I’ve really treasured your forgiveness,” Ben tells him. “That night outside the church. You didn’t have to do that.”

“Yeah,” he says, “I did.”

“So if you let me go, John, then the question remains: why are you still here?”

There are bird calls in the quiet of that moment. 

“Forgiving you should have been enough,” John says. “Enough to be done with you, after what you did to me. But I don’t...what was left over, after I got rid of anger, was…” He seems to struggle with it, the size of the emotion he’s wrestling with. “This place was supposed to be for all of us, so we could find each other. Move on together. And I left you behind.”

Perverse, that he should blame himself for this. “You didn’t leave me. I chose to stay behind. I had work to do.”

“You did.” He crosses his arms. “Maybe I did too. I just didn’t like the idea of you all alone back there, beating yourself up.”

“You couldn’t wait?”

“I did wait. I waited a long time, Ben. It stands to reason that even someone who’s got as much to atone for as you should reach a...a point where they’re absolved. But never happened for you, Ben. It still hasn’t happened.”

“So the plan was to...what, bring me over to the other side? Are you my guardian angel, John?”

He pulls a face. “I don’t believe in that stuff. I don’t think you do either.” He sighs, small and careful. “I came back to...to get to know you better. Spend time with you. Get you to forgive yourself even a little bit, if I could. And instead, I…” He covers his eyes for a moment. His face colors, just a little. He’s thinking about what happened in the tent. 

“John?” Ben reaches out, plucks the sleeve of John’s shirt, tugs him ever-so-slightly forward. “I think we both know that whatever happened in Oregon, I was deliberately involved.”

“But you didn’t really know who I was. You didn’t know what I knew.” He takes Ben by the shoulder. “And I was supposed to be here for you. To help you. This shouldn’t have been about me.”

Ben becomes quietly conscious of the fact that he could knock John to the ground, if he wanted to. He could have him on his back in the mud in seconds and maybe then John wouldn’t think him so fragile or so helpless. Maybe then John would remember who he is.

But then, they were rarely physical with one another. More’s the pity. Ben makes two tight fists in the lapels of John’s shirt and drags him forward, kisses him in a way that’s nearly a bite. 

At first, John’s hands are on Ben’s shoulders, pushing him back, but that resistance fades quickly, very quickly. Soon he can feel John’s fingers creeping up the back of his neck to push greedily into his hair, he can feel the weight of John’s arm wrapping around his waist to drag him close, to drag them both flat together. Ben releases him just enough to touch John’s jawline, to let his fingertips catch on stubble. On the way there, he grazes over John’s pulse, hammering. His own heart must be hammering too.

It’s a very strange feeling, something so familiar and yet so baffling.

They break apart for just a moment.

“All that other stuff,” John pants into the warm crush of their brows pressed together, their mouths scarcely apart, “seemed really important at the time.”

“It was, John.”

He’s playing with Ben’s hair a little like he can scarcely believe he’s touching it. “Doesn’t feel that way now, though, does it?”

Fumbling with the buttons on Locke’s shirt, Ben says, “No, not at all.”

* * *

After a short while, they collect themselves.

“So, where are we headed?” Ben asks as he plucks his vest from a nearby bush, only to immediately drop it again. No point now. It’s just too hot. 

“To the beach,” John says. “Hugo’s waiting for us.”

“Oh.” Ben steps back onto the path and begins walking with John again, side by side. “It’ll be nice to see Hugo again.”

“It’s part of why I asked for his help on this. He knows you better than anybody, knew you longer than anybody.” John gives him a gentle nudge. “I think he missed you too.”

“What comes after that?”

“We could move on together, to what’s next. Or we can stay.”

“Here? On the Island?” 

Locke shrugs. “Or Tustin. We can teach. If that’s what you want.” He’s got a funny little smile on his face, one that’s become familiar to Ben over the past few months, but he only now understands.

“You find that funny? That my true calling, removed from the pressures of the Island, is as a halfway decent high school history teacher?”

“Yeah. Yeah, it is pretty funny. But it’s one of those things that makes sense when you think about it for a while.” He clasps Ben by the shoulder. “Anyway, don’t sell yourself short. You’re at least decent.”

Decent. Lovely. “Thank you, John.” He takes a deep breath. “I think you should move on, whatever I choose.”

Without hesitation, “No.”

“Yes. I’m not…” Ben catches him by the wrist, drags John to a stop. “I’ve made your life difficult enough. Don’t let me keep you out of paradise for one second longer.”

John places his big square hand over Ben’s, cradles it gently. “I’ve given it a lot of thought, Ben. I don’t know what you are to me. I just know that I want to understand you better. I’m not waiting for you anymore.” He squeezes Ben’s hand. “I’ll stay wherever you are.”

Ben backs him slowly against the trunk of a banyan tree. They remain there for a while.

There’s always a faint nervousness that overcomes Ben on the beach. He feels exposed on the white sand, trapped with only water before him. But there’s nothing to be concerned about here. John’s arm is slung low across his back and he’s been forgiven by everyone but himself.

Hugo sits on the sand, feet extended into the surf. He’s got headphones pushed over his curly hair, a Discman whirring noisily in the sand. He slides the headphones around his neck as they approach. “I haven’t seen one of these in, like, forever,” he says. And then, “Hi, Ben.”

“Hey, Hugo.”

“You doing OK?”

Ben thinks. “About as OK as I can be.”

“Right on.” Hugo squints up at John in the midday sun. “So, it all worked out?”

“Not exactly,” John admits, sheepishly. He tightens his arm around Ben’s waist. “It’s Ben’s decision. What we do next.” 

Hugo nods solemnly. “OK. Cool. Good work.” He turns back to Ben. “What do you want to do, man?”

Ben thinks about that. Want has become an abstract thing, with him. He spent his youth biding his time, holding on with the patience of a glacier, resenting everyone that came near. He spent his adulthood scrambling to clutch onto a kind of power that never suited him, that made him feel safe and uneasy all at once. He spent the last, interminably long portion of his life atoning, learning to serve needs other than his own. Want never factored into it. Guilt often did. 

He turns to John. “I think I’d like to see Alex graduate.”

John folds him into his arms then, unexpectedly. Just holds him, firm and gentle. “That all?” he asks, voice warm against Ben’s ear.

“Not all,” Ben says, letting his arms fall around John gently, tentatively. “But it’s where I’d like to start.”


End file.
